Dungeons & Dragons ruled a threat to prison security | Hacker News Reader

Dungeons & Dragons ruled a threat to prison security

abovethelaw.com

68 pointswybo60 comments

The court applied the Turner test, which is very similar to the rational basis test: the plaintiff was burdened with showing that the threat of gang formation was "so remote as to render the policy arbitrary or irrational."

This may strike some as odd, given that 1st Amendment cases typically use strict scrutiny, not rational basis. But, here's the catch: it doesn't apply in prison! In prison, your 1st amendment rights are more limited, and something akin to the rational basis test does indeed apply. To quote the court:

"In Turner, the Supreme Court determined that prison regulations that restrict inmates' constitutional rights are nevertheless valid if they are reasonably related to legitimate penological interests."

So, despite the apparent silliness of banning D&D, it seems the prison was within its rights to do so. The prison system may, at its discretion, inflict all kinds of petty punishments upon prisoners. If you're sent to prison, your rights are sharply curtailed. That's what the court decided in Turner, so that's the way it is.

Whether or not this is good policy is, of course, open to debate. It depends on what balance you want to strike between the punitive/rehabilitative purposes of prison. I'm of the opinion that criminal justice ought to be primarily aimed at reducing recidivism, but then society at large doesn't really agree with me.

Here's the full decision:

http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-7th-circuit/1498113.html

This makes me think of Weird Al's "White and Nerdy"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9qYF9DZPdw

I attended a military academy, which mildly resembled prison in a few respects. We weren't allowed out of the dorms after 7pm, and an instructor would make sure we were all in bed (checking off our names on a checklist) and turn the light out in our rooms for us. Then he'd stay there and make sure we didn't leave our rooms until just before Reveille.

The jocks and bad atitude cases would sometimes dress up as commandos in all-black outfits and go on "missions" to sneak off have trysts with girlfriends or pull pranks (like shining the breasts of one female statue on campus.) They'd often get caught, which was bad because it was technically a dismissal offense. Me, I was part of a group that snuck around after lights out to gather and play D&D. Actually, we didn't sneak. We just put on dress uniform, and the security guards assumed we were Officer of the Day.

No, I did not have a girlfriend in High School.

The arguments the gang "expert" made about similarities between D&D player organization and gang organization would apply equally well to many organized religions, such as Catholicism. I wonder if a prison could get away with banning that?

The only part of the argument which got quoted in the article is that in D&D, some people give orders to other people, and in that way, it "mirrors the structure of a gang". Which is an argument that would encompass not just religion, but all sorts of other things. In a poetry group, one prisoner tells the others that today they'll be writing sonnets. A sure sign of gang activity!

In fairness, there may be more to the argument; all we have is a couple of paraphrased sentences from what was presumably a lot more testimony than that. But it doesn't help that those few sentences are inaccurate. The claim goes that "The Dungeon Master is tasked with giving directions to other players, which ... mimics the organization of a gang." That's not how I ever played D&D. The dungeon master doesn't give orders; he tells the players what happens when they do whatever they do of their own accord. One player character might give orders to another. But a DM that regularly tries to tell the PCs what to do, even through an NPC mouthpiece, is a pretty bad DM...

Spot on: the so called "Master" isn't a chief, but a world. A Good DM fades into the background, such that only the deeds of the PCs are remembered. I heard a passionate recall from a Starwars RPG once. The game master wasn't even mentioned.

On the other hand, the NPCs would probably agree that the PCs rampaging through their world are pretty ganglike.

Leads to the question: if Singer and his fellow players just got a little more "serious" about playing DnD, to the point where they could argue it constituted a religion, would they then be allowed to play?

Unlikely, courts tend to take a dim view on religions that aren't several hundreds if not thousands of years old.

It is a legal hack to prevent situations like the one you described.

Doesn't Scientology have the status of an accepted religion in the US?

They have an army of lawyers, and getting themselves declared a non-taxable religion in every country they operate in is their first priority.

They got an exception because of the all the rich/famous people they have.

So the defining characteristic of a religious entity is how much that entity can extort from its followers, and because Scientology extorts from the rich rather than the poor they attained this status faster.

Now where's my chapel in the Apple Store? I suppose the Genius Bar may constitute, but I'm smarter than those people so it doesn't provide me any solace.

> So the defining characteristic of a religious entity is how much that entity can extort from its followers, and because Scientology extorts from the rich rather than the poor they attained this status faster.

Wrong, the definining characteristic of a governmentally recognized religious entity is a religious entity that has enough wealth to successfully lobby the government into recognizing it.

> Now where's my chapel in the Apple Store? I suppose the Genius Bar may constitute, but I'm smarter than those people so it doesn't provide me any solace.

Believe it or not, the vast majority of Apple users don't consider Apple to be a religious entity or follow its every move with anything approaching religious fervor. They're just riding the technology pop culture wave.

Last I checked Catholic dogma, which has been a couple decades now, I think Steve has to actually pass away before he can become a saint.

Nah. Prison systems have a much more narrow definition of what constitutes a religion. Some have a pre-defined list of approved religions. Religions usually must be established and organized.

Oh dear... the groups that were going around in the 80s warning parents that D&D was satanism would have a field day with that.

They've since shifted their focus to Harry Potter.

I do wish that US prisons would decide whether they're in the business of punishment or rehabilitation. You see a lot of talk about rehabilitation, of course, but so much of what goes on in there seems to have no purpose but to punish people. (e.g. broad societal tolerance of prison-rape, or petty tyrannies such as those described in the article)

I'd prefer that they came down on the side of rehabilitation, of course... but I'd settle for /honesty/ about their goals.

>I do wish that US prisons would decide whether they're in the business...

They have decided. They are in the business of BUSINESS -- it is a profitable system where they harvest their crop through a corrupt system of laws - even outright bribing judges to send them new meat (like the case with the juvenile judges back east -- http://boingboing.net/2009/02/02/judges-jailed-for-ta.html)

Honesty about their goals == PROFIT

Rehabilitation is actually bad for business, since rehabilitated inmates won't be returning "customers". It's just so wrong that prisons are run by private companies...

What happened to the idea that D&D led to Satanism and suicide? This was a big deal back in the 1980s. You never hear about it anymore, and yet I haven't heard any of the old scaremongers actually admitting that they were wrong. Ditto for Satanic ritual abuse, which used to scare people out of their wits.

They moved on to the next scapegoat. Generally whatever they didn't do as a kid, and is now practiced by small numbers of smart introverted kids.

It's called a "moral panic", and they happen all the time. There have been moral panics about rock music, comic books, teenage sex parties, fictitious drugs, and video games.

If anyone wants to waste an afternoon developing a raging headache, I highly recommend reading some of the Wikipedia articles in the Moral Panic category.

Is there not, however, such a thing as a Moral Panic Panic?

For instance, if I manage to round up a dozen mouth-breathing parents to join my group Concerned Parents Against ASCII Porn On Twitter and it'll immediately be picked up by thousands of new outlets. There'll be a hundred front-page articles about the "New Puritanism" by next Sunday.

Bingo, we have a moral panic panic, and there's a moral panic panic to go with every moral panic, usually on a much larger scale.

My real point here is to point out that the moral panic about Dungeons and Dragons was probably never more than a very small number of people making a small amount of noise, amplified by a media hungry for controversial stories about stupid people.

PS. 8======D ----* (.)(.) pew pew pew

It was more than a fringe phenomenon. There was even a movie based on this train of thought, starring a now fairly respectable actor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazes_and_Monsters

Like the book on which it is based, the film treats the playing of roleplaying games as indicative of deep neurotic needs. At least one protagonist is (or at least appears to be) suffering from schizophrenia (or some analogous condition) and in the end, the attainment of mature adulthood by others players is accompanied by the abandonment of role-playing games.

I misread the title as 'Dungeons & Dragons used to test prison security'. Like some sort of walkthrough/role-play testing

    You are in a room with 2 prison guards
    The guards are armed with batons
    A mase spray can has been left on the ground
    There is a fold up chair in front of you ...

Predictably, I used to play Dungeons & Dragons in high school. Just as predictably, I didn’t lose my virginity until I stopped.

Um... it's 2011. Are we really still making "nerds can't get laid" jokes? I mean, Vin Diesel plays Dungeons & Dragons. I'm not offended or anything; the author is clearly joking, but it seems pretty low-brow for the opening hook on something posted to HN.

EDIT:

It's an established fact that Dungeons & Dragons is a bigger threat to human reproduction than all the gay marriages in the world.

Oh whoops. OK... complaint retracted. I expressly condone the usage of dated nerd jokes if used to setup a punchline this hilarious.

That'll teach me to comment before reading the rest of the friendly article.

EDIT 2:

I thought this sounded familiar... this is from January, 2010! Obligatory: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/1/27/

Are we really still making "nerds can't get laid" jokes?

Yes we are. We are also still making jokes about amoral lawyers, lying politicians, vain and vacuous models, lunk-headed bodybuilders, drunken frat boys, obese and poorly-dressed Walmart customers, and unintelligent, docile cows.

If you're offended by the subset of these which are about nerds not getting laid then, dude, you need to get laid.

Excellent point, but:

> I'm not offended or anything...

Also, I meant "we" as a community of intelligent hackers more than "we" as a global culture. I'm aware that jokes about undersexed nerds and beerful bros exist, but I thought that they are more hackneyed than the HN crowd would usually countenance. My second edit, I think, neatly explicates why it got posted here anyway. :-)

I must upvote BUT here are some disputes to your claims:

"Its 2011 Are we really still making "nerds can't get laid" jokes?"

Honestly, from my experience try s/D&D/World of Warcraft. Yes people who play WoW get laid. Highschool kids who play WoW instead of building up real social skills don't get laid.

The thing though is the author's assertion is incorrect. Its pretty hard to not get laid as you get to college. I mean you have to be in a closet pretty much. Which is what can happen with WoW or D&D. However the only virgin I know of (and hell, people I thought would die virgins have proved me wrong) is a virgin because she just does not like most guys shes met, and is too shy to do anything about the ones she does. Nothing to do with games.

Related to D&D and startups, my current project is a web-based virtual tabletop for roleplaying, built on node. =)

http://tabletopquest.com

why did you choose isomorphic over a top-down view? It looks interesting, though.

I had made a RPG mapping/gaming thing in flash WAY back in the day, and had always thought about making it into a web version. Never got around to it, though.

Good luck with yours. =)

All of the top-down approaches just look ugly to me. You're either looking at the top of people heads, or tokens of disembodied heads. This also gives it a pseudo-3d look, with a bit of clutter to add that homey tabletop atmosphere.

I came to the opposite conclusion. When you add perspective to game visualizations, it becomes harder to judge distances, estimate angles, make out details, and identify borders. Small items tend to get reduced to squint-inducing shapes. Large items occlude each other and cause an infuriating visibility problem. The only advantage is that it looks a little bit more like a "real" world, but if you're using a simplified art style, it doesn't matter anyway.

From a UX standpoint, the best balance is "iconic" perspective - most things rendered flat with low occlusion, like an Egyptian painting, much of medieval art, or Japanese woodblock prints. All the boundaries can remain clearly delineated with this style, but aesthetics can be retained through careful composition of each icon.

I did exactly this style for the game I'm working on. My reference points(within video games) are Ultima 1-5, Heroes of Might and Magic, and Battle for Wesnoth. In these games you are never wondering what something is, because you can always make out what it looks like.

Normally I'd agree with you, for those exact reasons, and my first prototypes were all generally flat (also being a fan of the Ultima series.)

But when I tried the current isometric style on a whim, it managed to solve all of the problems I was trying to address. Probably because I use a hybrid approach: only the underlying battlemat tiles are isometric. The miniatures are flat, slightly-transparent stand-ups and always face the player.

Have you seen RPTools' MapTool? It's a really nice looking top-down java app.

http://gallery.rptools.net/v/screenshots/

And of course Fantasy Grounds is an amazing piece of software if you have the money: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/screenshots/

Relevant: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/1/27/

this made me sad. I am tempted to post them my set of 20 sided dice.

this is irrelevant topic, for one, and it's also irrelevant in terms of even getting a voice! Once you go to prison for what this guy did (1st degree murder with a sledge hammer) your rights are no more. And when you have no rights, you don't even have a voice on the matter. You are to rot the rest of your fcking life in a jail cell. (period)

It sucks when someone gets murdered with a hammer, to put it lightly. That's why we ostensibly put murderers in jail: to keep them from killing again, to deter others, and perhaps to rehabilitate them. But your comment shows another motive, one that I find a lot less defensible: revenge. You want the criminals to suffer, in a perpetual act of state-sponsored sadism.

I don't want that. I wish other people didn't. It just feels sick to me.

Personally, I think the reasoning is completely bogus, however, I'm all for not allowing people to spend their day playing D&D while I and other tax payers pay for it (and I'll expand the D&D to anything that does not fall in the restitution or rehabilitation buckets).

On the other hand, I could see D&D being a good rehabilitation tool.

Personal rant aside, D&D sure seems like it would be a LOT better than some things I've read about in prison, but I also don't know the dynamics of prison life. Maybe the hierarchy of thugdom exhibits in potentially anything with a "leader" there.

One of my bosses got a lot of his "think on your feet" chops from D&D. He was damn good. No one ever caught him flat footed without an answer and all of his answers sounded good and scored a point for his side. I asked him once where it came from, and he told me it was playing D&D.

I love D&D. Many of my best memories of my early teen-age years revolve around D&D. I think D&D could be part of a good therapeutic tool, and if it is used as one, great, seriously.

I just have a hard time with the notion of "hanging out in prison, doing whatever I want." Prison should have a rehabilative aspect to it, for sure. It should also work as a very strong disincentive.

Unfortunately, we don't seem to be doing either very well.

The thing is, prison is already a heavy punishment. You don't get to see your family/friends. You can't stay current with your work environment. You don't get to go on holidays. You don't even get to choose meal times, bed time, or when you would like to do sport.

It's already a lousy experience for inmates - they've had a lot of freedoms taken away (note, I don't think this is a bad thing), but from there to denying them anything to distract themselves from their plight is quite cruel.

I learned a lot from playing D&D as well -- my interest in graphic/info design can be traced back to when I was designing my own charts and character sheets.

You probably should rephrase "some things I've read about in prison." I don't think you meant what it expresses.

Doh! Yes, you are correct, my English is apparently very poor, even though it was my first and only language.

To be clear: things I've round about prison not about in prison. Unfortunately, too late to edit.

I used to think that blogging couldn't hurt your career. Then I read this post.

From the sidebar:

This post is authored by Evan Jowers and Robert Kinney of Kinney Recruiting, sponsor of the Asia Chronicles. Kinney has made more placements of U.S. associates and partners in Asia than any other firm in the past four years.

Then we have the following professional-sounding quotes:

I used to play Dungeons & Dragons in high school. Just as predictably, I didn’t lose my virginity until I stopped.

any D&D “gang” member would find themselves tossing salads faster than you can say

I stopped reading at about this point. If you are going to do a legal analysis on your bullshit placement firm's blog, try to err on the side of being too professional. If you are going to make jokes, try to at least be funny.

He made it pretty clear it was self-depreciative humour. If this blog post actually offended you, instead of merely making you think that others might be offended, then I suggest that you lighten up a bit.

I'm offended by such bad writing.

And I'm offended by your general lack of humor and dismissal of the merits of the article (which I did not find that enjoyable) based on something so trivial. I used to think that commenting on HN could not hurt your career, but the smug attitude you displayed (ie: your answer towards nowarninglabel) could be an indication that I'm wrong. C'est la vie.

Unprofessional and bad aren't the same thing.

Remember, you can't give offence, you can only take it. If you are offended by something, you have nobody but yourself to blame.

That's a fairly silly attitude to take. Once can quite easily (common English idioms aside) give offence. One can't go around being gratuitously offensive to people and then blaming them for being offended. That's called "being a dick".

In this particular case, though, one would have to be extremely thin-skinned to be offended.

Nobody but you can be or should be responsible for your emotions. It is entirely up to you how you respond to somebody "being a dick", not to mention that's a completely subjective thing in the first place.

By that same logic, I should never do business with you because I find your opinion close-minded and should express that you shouldn't comment if you are not going to try to at least have a sense of humor.

Sounds good to me. A win for both of us.

"If you are going to do a legal analysis on your bullshit placement firm's blog...."

If you're going to knock a website at least take 2 seconds to look at the title before doing so.

"Above the Law: A Legal Tabloid - News, Gossip, and Colorful Commentary on Law Firms and the Legal Profession"

It's far from a "bullshit placement firm's blog", it's a tabloid focused on the legal industry. In fact, it's extremely popular in the legal world. Being light hearted in nature is a great way to entertain and grab the attention of people stuck reading legalese all day.

I'm pretty sure the article is by Elie Mystal, as it says at the top. The article in the sidebar is by Robert Kinney and Evan Jowers of Kinney Recruiting (the sidebar "article" more of a job list). Still, it's an easy enough distinction to miss that it could lead the guy to some trouble. Such is the price one pays for sponsoring content.

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